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Summer 2012

So summer seems to have come to a close both by calendar reckoning and by checking with the weather. So what have I been up to?

Well probably primarily just plain old work. Aside from that? Well, in the spring my overly ambitious plan to take 5 Coursera classes at the same time as working full time collapsed a bit. I did manager to pull off completing Software as a Service, Model Thinking and Game Theory.

After that I took some time off of “school”. I poked my old Lisp OpenGL flight sim but not to much noticeable effect. Reworked some of the model and rendering code and did manage to add an animated sidejet that pushes the ship sideways (all that work is in the rotate branch). Possibly in a year or two more at this slow pace I’ll have a fully movable ship. Anyways, it did make a good break.

I also ramped up my reading and discovered Goodreads into which I important my current to-read list and then explored its recomendation and lists to substantially expand it including most of the top reddit and other sci-fi lists. I’ve started cracking away at it so that should keep me occupied for a year or two.

But the break from school wasn’t to last. My friend Rob caught the first run through of the crypto class and broguht me back to coursera. So right now I’m just finishing off the Quantum Computing course (and doing rather poorly in it as its very much math and very little programming), and just starting the second run of Cryptography. And next month as crypto winds down I want to do the Scala class (taught by the author of the language! :D) and possibly the Human-Computer Interaction course if I can cram it in. We shall see.

On top of that I’ve finally gotten around to another goal I had for this year which was to start playing with Django a web framework in Python. I’ve just finished the 4 part intro tutorial and am ready to try a simple test site I’ve had in mind for a bit.

I also added one more new money and time consuming hobby this year: WarMachine. So that’s also a thing taking some of my time. For anyone curious, I play Cygnar.

Goals for the last quarter of the year? Well, actually finish my coursera courses, do the previously mentioned django test site, blog more than once every few months, cram/learn some spanish before my new years trip to Colombia to visit family, and read very many books. So we’ll see how that goes.